White People Problems: Tom Carson on Mad Men's Season Five Premiere

Editor's note: If you would prefer to remain blissfully ignorant about anything that happens in the fifth-season premiere, do not read any further.

Can it be Don Draper is turning 40? It can, and the surprise birthday bash thrown for him in his lavish new Manhattan pad is one of the showcase scenes—though far from the climactic one, just so you won't think I'm spilling too many beans—in Mad Men's long-awaited fifth-season premiere airing Sunday night. And here I fretted the show's 18-month hiatus would make it hard for everybody, fans included, to get back in the groove.

That's definitely "groove" as in "groovy," too. As usual, time has marched on in Mad Men's 1960s universe. For some of us, this season's calendar leaf is what we've been waiting for: the era when Don Draper's martinis-and-Marlboros generation caught on in earnest that it was no longer the final frontier in American cool. Sorry, no, Dad—in the emerging counterculture's eyes, you're Squaresville. The fun part is that boomers themselves, hippie usurpers long since turned as gray as Confederates, have learned all too vividly how that displacement feels.

Series creator Matthew Weiner has been planting premonitions of the Big Shift ever since the series's first season. In more than one sense, Don—or Don's swank ideal of Don, anyhow—has always lived on borrowed time. No other TV series has ever gotten so much out of the audience's consciousness of a whole sensibility's imminent obsolescence.

Back in 2007, though, skeptics could be forgiven for thinking that the smug point of Mad Men was to flatter us for our superior insight: "Wow, these guys don't even know they're dinosaurs." Then we learned to identify with Don, Peggy, Roger, Joan, Pete and the rest of the gang. To do that is to admit that what happened to them will happen to us.

Anyhow, at Don's Big 4-0 birthday party, the signs reading "This way to the exit, T-Rexes" aren't just in the shadows anymore. They're right in his pricey apartment, from the hired rock band playing Dobie Gray's "The In Crowd" (nice touch) to the black MC who may be the first African-American—or patently uncloseted gay, for that matter—ever to enter any home of Don's except as a servant. Even the wives of Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce's execs are wearing Fifth Avenue's idea of mod fashions, and the younger guests are quasi-openly toking up out on his balcony.

If you've been paying close attention for the past four seasons, you won't be puzzled by the news that none of this is Don's idea of a good time. Maybe at somebody else's swinging party, where he could glean insights without feeling implicated and maybe score some tail—but not his. His embarrassment and annoyance remind us that he's always been a contradiction in terms: a private man without a real inner life, just defense mechanisms so ingrained he may not know for sure what they're defending.

His reaction also brings out the stuffy streak his rakehell adulteries and boozing have often distracted us from paying too much attention to. "More people feel the way I do than the way you do," he stiffly reproaches the party's instigator, and he's probably right so far as that goes. Yet as he no doubt knows, life in Manhattan is never about what the majority thinks. It's about what's new under the sun, and being up to speed on that used to be one of his prides.

Our first inklings of the cranky old codger Don could turn into if cirrhosis or lung cancer don't get him first are only one reason the premiere ep has me wondering if Mad Men's fifth season could be its best yet. That's something that almost never happens this late in the game. But Weiner and his collaborators are taking full advantage of the fact that we're now as intimate with this bunch as we were with the Starship Enterprise's original crew—who are, after all, their contemporaries in a way.

For instance, Pete Campbell discernibly isn't a callow fink anymore. A confirmed adult, which he doesn't necessarily like much, Pete seems to be mulling whether he wants to stay petty and grasping forever or investigate something he's seldom cared about—you know, his (cough) values. On the distaff side, the familiar contrast between Joan and Peggy—the Old Order's pinup queen versus the unwitting, canary-in-a-coal-mine incarnation of feminism a-borning—is getting more complicated now that Peggy's no longer all that much of a spring chicken and Joan is feeling her oats. As for Jared Harris's Lane Pryce, Britain's ultimate lonely boy in New York, let's just say he's feeling his haggis.

By most shows' fifth seasons, the actors are either coasting or so fed up with their roles (here's looking at you, James Gandolfini) that the only emotion they can get jazzed enough to play convincingly is rage. But not this show, obviously. If, like me, you started out thinking of Jon Hamm as a handsome lug who'd lucked into the ideal part for him, we've all learned different since then—and not only on Mad Men, either. In Friends with Kids, he's got a long, bitter dinner-party drunk scene that knocks the rest of the very appealing cast into sitcomland by comparison.

Because Don is so guarded that even his decisions to vent aren't spontaneous, the performance is all about the multiplying evasions and calculations in Hamm's face. The wonder is that he can still tantalize us into thinking we might decode something new about the former Dick Whitman in each pained, reflective, quickly suppressed grimace between unfelt smiles. The ever-wonderful John Slattery, on the other hand, is all about the dialogue—and that's as it should be, since banter is what Roger Sterling lives for. An emotion he can't convert into a quip or an insult might as well belong to someone else for all he cares. And yup, I admit it: Tin Man, I think I've missed you most of all.

On top of that, judging from the premiere, this is the season when Mad Men will finally tackle one awfully prominent 1960s social topic that the show has (hint, hint) often been accused of skimping on in the past. You'll know what it is from the opening shot, and if anyone can find an original take on the subject at this late date, Weiner's the man. That's borne out by his choice of end-credits music, maybe the most cockamamie-but-perfect period tune he's ever used—and he's used more than a few—to jolt us into a fresh perspective on what we've just been watching. So are you salivating yet?